page_title: Bowler hat
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Bowler hat / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: Young Stan Laurel
context_page_description: The bowler hat, also known as a billycock, bob hat, bombín or derby, is a hard felt hat with a rounded crown, originally created by the London hat-makers Thomas and William Bowler in 1849. It has traditionally been worn with semi-formal and informal attire. The bowler, a protective and durable hat style, was popular with the British, Irish, and American working classes during the second half of the 19th century, and later with the middle and upper classes in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the east coast United States.
context_section_description: The bowler hat became used famously by certain actors, such as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Curly Howard, and John Cleese, and also by the fictional character of John Steed of The Avengers, played by Patrick Macnee.
  In the 1964 film Mary Poppins, set in Edwardian London, 1910, the London banker George Banks (played by David Tomlinson) wears a bowler. The British building society Bradford & Bingley registered more than 100 separate trademarks featuring the bowler hat, its long-running logo. In 1995 the bank purchased, for £2,000, a bowler hat which had once belonged to Stan Laurel.
  The bowler is part of the Droog uniform that the English character Alex wears in A Clockwork Orange to the extent that contemporary fancy dress outfits for this character refer to the bowler hat.
  There was a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, California known as Brown Derby. The first and most famous of these was shaped like a derby. A chain of Brown Derby restaurants in Ohio are still in business today.
  Many paintings by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte feature bowler hats. The Son of Man consists of a man in a bowler hat standing in front of a wall. The man's face is largely obscured by a hovering green apple. Golconda depicts "raining men" all wearing bowler hats.
  Choreographer Bob Fosse frequently incorporated bowler hats into his dance routines. This use of hats as a props, as seen in the 1972 movie Cabaret, would become one of his trademarks.
caption: English comedian Stan Laurel took his standard comic devices from the British music hall: the bowler hat, the deep comic gravity, and nonsensical understatement.[12]
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